I write about style, art, culture, watches and high-end cars as a staff writer for Forbes. Whether I'm talking with Bernard Arnault, Jeff Koons or Ralph Lauren, my goal is to explore life from the inside, to figure out what success means to those who believe they have attained it--or are well on their way. Write to me at helliott@forbes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter (@HannahElliott), Instagram (@HannahElliottxo), Facebook and Google+.

Jeff Gordon's Dad: How To Make Your Kid A Star Racecar Driver

Jeff Gordon’s 87 Sprint Cup wins place him third among the ranks of the greatest racecar drivers in history. Last year alone he earned $12.7 million for his skill behind the wheel, plus another $5.5 million for endorsements with companies like DuPont and DVX. And in 2009 he became the first NASCAR driver to reach $100 million in career winnings.

Gordon credits his stepfather, John Bickford, for coaching him toward that success. After speaking with Bickford last week I can see why. The man comes across as unusually optimistic, diligent, observant and conscientious about details—all qualities the best athletic coaches possess—and he has known Gordon since the driver was six months old. (It was he who put Gordon on the race track at age five.)

Back then Bickford was dating Gordon’s mom, Carol, who worked with him at a medical supply company in Vallejo, Calif. They saw each other occasionally at work–but they bonded over washing clothes.

“Our friendship really developed by me going with her to do laundry,” Bickford says with a grin. “She had cloth diapers–we didn’t have pampers back then–so I’d hold Jeff and talk to Jeff’s older sister, and Carol would do the laundry. The laundry mat takes an hour and a half or so, so I was just kind of a friend, and then, you know, time goes on.”

Bickford says he saw the same characteristics in Gordon then that he does now: focus, discipline, determination and intelligence. It’s the same mentality he sees in Gordon’s three-year-old son, Leo.

“I tell Jeff now that with your son, well that apple fell very close to the tree,” he says. “Those outbursts of emotion that are often referred to as temper tantrums, those were Jeff Gordon at three. And also that absolute ability to concentrate on whatever he is doing and him trying to be better at every little game he plays, that’s exactly how Jeff was at three years old.”

Gordon says the slight separation felt inevitably between a stepfather and son, rather than a father and son, actually benefitted the relationship.

“It was that little bit of disconnect that I think allowed him to push me just enough, and I’m so thankful for that,” Gordon told me last month. “We worked together so much that if he had been my biological father I don’t know if we could have gone through the stresses that we had to go through at times. For some reason when he’d say, ‘If you want to be better you have to do this,’ I’d listen to him instead of rebelling against him.”

Bickford says much the same. He told me that he believes kids “start their personalities” somewhere around the age of two or three (“I saw the humble generosity and a quiet-like-a-fox personality way back when Jeff was three or four years old–extremely competitive”) but that looking back there was no way to tell for certain whether Jeff would become a star.

We spoke at length about how best to coach a child toward reaching elite levels of success in any sport. Bickford had plenty of sound advice on the subject. Read on for more of the conversation.

Hannah Elliott: In hindsight can you see certain points along Jeff’s early career that indicated he’d be extremely successful as a driver?

John Bickford: I don’t think a parent ever knows that. Here’s what happens: As a parent of a racer you are looking for the next opportunity to perform. It’s somewhat of a dream because the problem of it is if you don’t have adequate funding to create your plan – which we did not – you are building prerequisites. So what I used to tell Jeff is we don’t have enough money to go to the top of motor sports. In the days when we were working up, the Indy car drivers and Formula 1 drivers made a lot more money than the stock car drivers made. You have to go back and remember we were looking up at the top in 1986, so we knew that the likelihood of us going to Formula 1 is probably not a realistic goal.

We didn’t know anything about stock cars. We grew up doing quarter midgets and go-cars, so we knew a little bit about open wheel. So we said, ‘Okay let’s move to Indiana. Let’s go position ourselves right in the heart of Indy car racing and let’s go do good and try to be good in front of all those people.’

We didn’t have a plan other than that: Be good in front of people. Our goal was go to out and be good.

HE: Sounds simple enough.

JB: If you’re a parent, your kid is the best. I don’t care how bad your kid is, you think that he is the best. I’m a little bit fortunate because I’m a step-dad. Certainly I have the emotional connection of a dad, but at the same time I’d been doing this long before I met his mother so I’m a little bit better at facing the reality of things. It’s not for me to decide whether he is good, it’s for the guy who is going to spend the money on him. We really worked hard at that.

I was very lucky in that I came upon for whatever reason the idea that the owners were going to need a different prerequisite from their drivers than they were currently getting. The drivers that were being hired then were lacking, and it was really something that prevented teams from growing: Their ability to communicate with the media was weak.

Jeff was like 15, and I was looking out there thinking these guys are terrible on TV. If you’re looking for someone to represent some kind of a sponsor, they’re terrible. So I told Jeff as we sat in front of the TV, I said, ‘Watch that driver.’ I’d say, ‘What do you think he did wrong?’ Jeff said, ‘Well, he says uh and this and that and he doesn’t open his mouth, he’s bent over looking down, he won’t look at the camera, he’s got his uniform tied around his waist, he’s all dirty, he’s not being readily available to the media, he working on the car and won’t talk to the media and they ask him a question and he names every sponsor he can think of but he doesn’t answer the question.’ So I said, ‘Let’s be different. Let’s try to do all the other things.’

HE: He got it.

JB: Yes. We reversed. We went out and we talked to the media. When we went to races I took a sheet of stats and gave it to the announcer and said, ‘Here’s what’s been going on in Jeff’s life.’ And it wasn’t like we won 100 races; it was just current events, very short bullet points. I’d give him like six t-shirts–three adults, three kids — I’d be like, ‘Here, give these away to the fans. They want more t-shirts tell them to come down and see us afterwards.’

So the media were going, ‘We’re loving this Jeff Gordon kid. He sells tickets. He’s good-looking. He races good. We‘ve got all the information on him. He’s fun to talk to.’

Pretty soon ESPN comes along and those ESPN announcers are riding with us in the car and we’re helping them set up. I build all the camera mounts so they can put cameras on the cars, so guess who gets the on-car camera?

We did a lot of things like that. It never was a situation where I had to say anything. They were saying it. At the end of the day, they: The other people. The media is going to put him in the news, they’re going to tell stories about him, and the car owners are going to hear stories not from a dad going, ‘I’ve got the greatest son in the world! He’s winning every race, he’s this and he’s that.’ I never had to say a word. The media did the talking, and the performance on track did the talking.

HE: What do you say when other parents asked for advice on how to handle their own child’s career?

JB: I tell them the very worst thing for a young race car driver is the parents. They say, ‘What do you mean?! We’ve done everything. We’ve done this we’ve done that.’ Thank you, and you should be rewarded some day, and I hope that just the very fact that you’ve invested in your child is adequate reward. You should stop there because you’re giving them an opportunity, a platform to display a skill on a stage—either for an actor or a dancer or a race car driver–to highlight and show the skills they have. To be out there with a megaphone yelling, ‘This is the most wonderful person in the world!’ is an annoyance. Haha.

They look at me and go, ‘But how is anyone going to know?’ And I say to them that if in fact your son or daughter is performing on the greatest stages in America–and performing is a key word here–you don’t need to say anything. You will be sought after.

And if you are not performing, you will not be sought after and no matter how big your megaphone is you’re going to create a situation where you’re going to be such an annoyance to someone that they’ll say, ‘Okay I’ll hire your kid just shut up.’ And then you know what happens? Your kid gets in the car and he doesn’t perform and your head goes between your legs and your wife is mad at you and you go home and she is screaming and yelling. You’re having terrible family fights at home, your kid is in a depression, and it was all because you amplified something he didn’t really have.

For the kids who really do perform, do your work so that they are great in media and they can speak and they are educated. Make sure they can talk intelligently, they understand the English language, they don’t make up words, they listen to questions, they actually answer the question that was asked of them, and they do it in a timely fashion so the media can get what they need and put it on TV. Understand how TV works. Understand what the media need, and then make sure you have taught that to your child.

See, that doesn’t cost any money. It doesn’t cost 10 cents to use common sense. Watch other people set a bar: Who is the best that you know of? Find the little idiosyncrasies and the weaknesses in that person and try to make your son better than that.

Constantly improve. It costs you nothing. It costs nothing to have ironed shirts when you go to the track. To go as a slob costs the same amount as to go with an ironed shirt! Polish your shoes. How much does it cost to polish your shoes? I mean, come on.

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NASCAR is one form of racing and it is not the most challenging or technically advanced. Formula One is accepted as the pinnacle of motor racing. I think Jeff Gordon could have done well in F1, but we will never know. I don’t begrudge him the choices he has made and I absolutely recognize his success. Just don’t equate NASCAR with high-end motor racing… it is very successfully commercialized hillbilly racing.

Clearly this poster is living in 1990. Tell me friend, how many drivers of this sso-called hillbilly racing that are competing in the Chase this year actually from the South? I’ll even do you one better and ask you to tell me, since the turn of the century how many drivers from the South have actually won a championship in NASCAR? Furthermore, how many tracks since 2000 have lost a race date to tracks outside of the South? Wake up please. It’s 2013. The irony of this remark is that the very driver this article is focused on is about as anti-hillbilly as you can get. Unless you’re so narrow-minded to think that driving a stock car itself makes you a hillbilly. Speaking of, you say that the most computerized and easiest-handling cars to drive, Formula One, takes more talent than driving a a 3400 lb. stoxk car without power steering? If you know anything of racing that is downright laughable. It was only a few years ago that Formula One cars were no longer allowed to use TRACTION CONTROL, not to mention all the otherhandicaps they still use today. Ever heard of the names Danica Patrick, Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti, and Scott Speed just to name a few? Sure you have. They’re all open-wheel drivers who FAILED miserably at racing stock cars because they didn’t have the skill required to perform at a level high enough to maintain a ride with someone else. I know I know. Danica will be around next year and probably the year after that. So was Montoya until he no longer had a ride. Now he’s back to open wheel racing where he belongs.

Great Article, Hannah. Nice for John to share his thoughts. As a motorsports marketing mentor and career coach I get this question constantly from racing parents and John’s input will be nice to also share with them. I have had the good fortune of hearing John speak at my marketing summit events I have co-hosted in Charlotte for up and coming drivers and he is straight to the point and does not sugar coat anything which is always the best way to truly help people. I also was there watching Jeff rise up the ranks and what he says is true and I remember trying to get an on-car camera for my car during the ESPN Thursday Night Thunder events and I was always wondering how Jeff always got one and now I know how – Brilliant, John! I am going to share this article with my clients, students and followers. – Annamarie (www.marketingatfullspeed.com)